


After Party

by tagliatellegrande



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV), A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Alcohol, F/F, girlfriends who don't tell each other anything mood, soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-24
Updated: 2020-06-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:07:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24898150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tagliatellegrande/pseuds/tagliatellegrande
Summary: Georgina and Esmé bicker like an old married couple. (Georgina thinks about that more often than she should.)
Relationships: Georgina Orwell/Esmé Squalor
Comments: 5
Kudos: 17





	After Party

“Someone should make an honest woman out of you,” Georgina says, somewhat slumped in the chair (her chair, as she thinks of it) in Esmé’s apartment. She is closing her eyes, her head tilted, when she says it; she is drunk and half embarrassed, recalling somewhere in the lowered eclipse of her head that it sounds like something her father might have said, or perhaps did once say to her. It’s hard to remember things like that at a certain age and harder still in the apartment of the city’s begrudgingly ninth most important financial advisor. 

The real party was last week on the Saturday. Huge, apparently: Georgina has been getting used to seeing Esmé and that dress on newsstands or splayed across someone’s hands reading on the subway. It’s now the Friday of the following week, and the age Esmé claims to have turned has only been getting lower - none of the papers reported a fixed number. It started in feigned secrecy, and a few weeks before the big event she was thirty-something (the better side, she had added fleetingly, half-turned and moving some cups around on the counter), and then it was her thirtieth. Now it stands at twenty-nine; she said it half ironically, looking over her fingernails. 

Georgina thinks Esmé is the most accomplished woman in her twenties she has ever met, but will not find herself caught in whatever the trap of mentioning this factual error might be. (If Esmé were still under thirty, Georgina doubts that she would be here whatsoever.)

“People have been trying that for years.” Years is pronounced more closely, in Georgina’s lexicon, to yards. Esmé is curled on the couch close to her, her knees tucked beneath her, and is looping a finger around the head of a slim and recently filled champagne glass. In the past half hour, Esmé has claimed to have invented a new cocktail, topping Georgina’s whisky tumbler up with the fizz - and, funnily, a bourbon soaked cherry speared by a toothpick, found in a glass jar in a pantry that seems to contain only alcohol and cocktail ingredients. 

“You wouldn’t?”

“Everybody knows that marriage is just the subjugation of women’s wealth, darling, and my stocks are doing something marvellous this quarter.”

Georgina smiles slyly and takes a sip from her glass. She has to admit that Esmé is never without her surprises. “Now, where did you get that idea?” 

“Academia is full of commies, Georgie.” Esmé rests her cheek on her hand and smiles beguilingly, a flash of her teeth slipping from the perfectly red lips. “And some of them aren’t even so bad looking.” 

Swilling the liquid gently in her glass, Georgina replies in a wry, quiet murmur: “I’m surprised you remember.” 

“It takes a hideous amount of time to become a Doctor, doesn’t it, darling?” Because they are drunk, and because Esmé laughs so immediately, her nose dipped forward and her shoulders curving, Georgina laughs too, closing her eyes again, delirious, and her head pressed into the lurching, high back of the chair. 

“You bitch,” she sighs, gently shaking her head. Her hair rubs against the plush seat. Esmé only hums. When Georgina has opened her eyes again, there is a residual laughter on Esmé’s face, quibbling on her mouth. She feels a strange tenderness for her that she blames immediately on the drinking, and perhaps because Esmé is looking directly at her, her eyes very blue and as sharp as ground diamonds. 

Georgina doesn’t have the terminology for whatever it is that Esmé is wearing, other than vague things that drop into her head at pace with the movements of her eyes; a fur coat worn persistently indoors, the colour of a skinned blonde mink; something that must be termed a bra or a bralette, subtly patterned in a fashion that reminds Georgina of hypnotic rings; a lightly coloured denim skirt. There were heels, but she is barefoot now. (For Georgina’s part, she has made somewhat of an effort to keep up, and the suit she is wearing is patterned in a blue check that seemed to everybody like a good idea that year.) 

“Woah now,” Georgina says lowly, as one might try to command a startled horse, when Esmé moves slippingly from the couch to her feet. She doesn’t seem to mind when the last dregs of her drink are spilled onto the carpet by the catch of her arm, the soft noise of it not even registering on her face. Instead, she takes a seat on the side of Georgina’s chair, and when Georgina wraps her arm around her to make sure there are no further accidents, Esmé slinks into the edge of the seat, her legs neatly lay across Georgina and over the side of the other arm. 

“Which birthday is it, really?” Georgina asks her. She sincerely doesn’t know - and not for lack of trying. The files on Esmé are low, despite that she has been ensconced within the range of their network, as Georgina likes to think of it, for years and years now. Most of the clippings are reviews, the Snicket’s, and images by journalists that Georgina might have liked to look at for longer and in more relaxed circumstances. “You’re somewhere around that Baudelaire, aren’t you?” she says pryingly. Her eyes are intent on Esmé’s face. 

“Younger.” She says it lavishly, as if her date of birth might be an achievement. 

“Is that so?” 

“You people have the happy accident of making my whole life my freshman year.” 

“My name is not you people.” 

It’s not often that Esmé will concede a point. But with her fingernails like the hover of a hammer behind Georgina’s neck, she smiles drowsily, she nods: “How true that is. You’re mine.” Georgina thinks she is going to be kissed and feels the indulgent youthfulness of her breath being caught, as if grabbed in her throat, as she waits. All that comes is a kiss that grazes her cheek, and then a forehead nearby, and Esmé is breathing quite slowly. Her eyes are closed and her head rests against Georgina’s temple. 

“You’re being oppressive.” Georgina lets her fingers leave her glass. She steals a hand slowly instead over Esmé’s smooth calf. “You cynic,” she murmurs, her mind back on Esmé’s jaunty trill of an answer. “You’re too young for all that.” Her hand is forced to pause when Esmé moves again. She stands unsteadily, and Georgina keeps her hand for a moment as she moves from her seat on the chair, making sure that Esmé survives her little landing to the floor. 

“I’m going to bed, Georgie.” Esmé has always had a way of making that sound like a command. Georgina, who has a little left in her glass, thinks she has been invited here on an intimate enough basis to enjoy a quiet minute or so with the last of her drink.

When Esmé leaves the room, she turns off all the lights. Georgina sighs deeply, finishes the glass in an inelegant slug, and follows her to bed.

* * *

The fur coat is on a chair. The skirt is on the floor. Esmé is half dressed and very hot, she is saying, only half beneath the covers; it is half two in the morning and Georgina is folding her suit. “You’re drunk,” she tells Esmé. Esmé only smiles mirthfully back at her.

“And you. I thought decades of drinking alone had rather ruined you for that.” Why is she wriggling? Georgina is thinking. A waste of a look at her - she will only be encouraged and will never go to sleep. 

“Har-har,” comes the dry response. “Not as alone as you’d think. You must think my life starts the moment you gave me that duff reading from the crystal ball - which you shouldn’t have had your hands on to start with, I might add.” She’s using that blasted voice, Esmé recognises, which is slightly lecturing and lasts too long on all the vowels. 

“Oh, don’t start that! Come to bed. You make it sound like we’re arguing, and on my birthday, of all days.” 

“Your birthday was last week.” 

“My birthday is when I say so, George.” Esmé likes that last one. She likes the abruptness of it, she likes that it makes Georgina roll her eyes as if to say, and who’s George? And she likes it most because Georgina is in her bed now, with her glasses on the bedside, and she has mercifully opened a window. The room feels a little cool and quiet with the stagnant noise and breeze of the city. “You’re wrong, anyhow.” 

“I doubt it.” 

“I always imagine what a strange little creature you must have been. My poor Georgie.” Esmé’s nails are at her temple, passing her ear, and then her hand slips lower, cupping her face, where there must be the stain of that earlier kiss. “I always think about that. Too smart by a half, weren’t you, darling?” 

“I have no idea what you mean.” 

“I’ve been trying to nail your accent for a long while, Georgina, smarty-pants, and I realised only recently that it sounds like small. Although,” she goes on, with a withering look, “I take back smarty-pants entirely. You’d think you might have made the effort.” Esmé withdraws her hand and lies on the flat of her back, as if she is already bored with this thread of her thoughts, as if she does not talk like a bouncy ball being paddled by an obnoxious child. “That’s what you do when you love someone, Georgie, you think about how measly their life must have been before you came into it.”

Georgina never fails to be astounded by Esmé’s cunning little word games. How she traipses fluently through such revealing sentences only to see if someone will say it back to her, slower - and what a highly aggravating feature it would be in someone not so endeared to her. She can see entirely why Esmé bothers them: the triad of Snickets, the Baudelaire, and him especially, with his incorrigible habit of leaving women hanging. Georgina shouldn’t analyse (and particularly not when celebrating Esmé’s birthday, which seems impolite and somewhat unkind), but she can’t help but find it fascinating, how Esmé is only capable of talking through herself, of basing an example on herself. It would be narcissistic to an untrained ear - and vulnerable to a clever one. Textbook is a word that Georgina has come to associate with Esmé.

Actors and writers and dramatists. The slant of Georgina’s mouth sets slightly as she recalls the too many she has known. She has never much liked them - or young people, either. 

“Which of your birthdays is it, Esmé?” Georgina pulls the covers higher. They move naturally with each other, Esmé turning to lie with her head in the crook of Georgina’s arm, and the chill from the window slightly dampening Esmé’s heat-soaked body. (She will be ill tomorrow, Georgina would like to bet, and yet somehow she can’t imagine it.)

“Thirty-fifth, if you’re really dying to know.”

“Was that so hard?” 

“Was it so important?” 

“I know how to keep a secret.” Georgina is quiet for a moment. Esmé’s nails scratch against her skin idly, her eyelids drooping. She will blame her in the morning that her makeup is on and that she has missed her usual regimen of cow’s milk moisturisers and chemical ablutions. “Would you like a secret too?” 

Esmé knows instantly that something is wrong with this. She withdraws slightly, her fingers poised as if interrupted, and her eyes narrowed. She doesn’t like Georgina’s tone and thinks she may be being patronised, which she has never liked; although thirty-five is nowhere near old, of course, it’s far too old for being patronised with one of Georgina’s honey dripping, shit-eating voices. 

“Do go on.” 

“I don’t know what you’re looking so frightened for.” The twist of a smirk is making it worse. But Georgina takes her hand, smooths it over with her fingers. She has doctor’s hands, Esmé likes to go on and on when she is feeling generous, with the neatly manicured nails, unpainted and healthy, and the artful precision, the subtle power, in her movements. “It’s not like you to say you love me.”

“I’m not understanding the secret, George?” 

“Esmé Gigi Geniveve,” Georgina says, slowly, knowing how much Esmé hates (because she has often, casually, told her) how she sullies her name with her coarse accent, whatever it is. Gigi pronounced far too harshly, she says, and Geniveve not _en français_ \- as if Esmé’s French is anything to envy, her sublime accent aside. “I’m sure you see my point.”

“You’re sure, are you?” She rolls her eyes, retracts her hand. It is with the majesty of a tiger, even now, like this, that she straddles Georgina, shaking out her hair. “Goddamn, Georgie,” she says, and Georgina knows she is playing now, teasing the little Americanism through her teeth with zeal. “Shall we do it? Yes then, let’s do it - for your sake. Marry me, marry me, marry,” she murmurs, her nose dipping close to Georgina’s - and still no kiss. “Article one, hands off my stocks, shares and illiquid assets. Article two, hands on me, often, always, regularly - as much as you can manage.”

(She is finding herself very funny again, Georgina notices, thinking the severity of her laughter is completely unwarranted.) 

“Go on - scram.” Georgina cannot think of a way to gently remove her. Her intuitions are correct, as they most usually are: Esmé is trouble, and a pest, and difficult. ‘Bad news’ is the sort of litotic comment from her childhood that would be used to quickly sift to the rotten core of people like Esmé. Perhaps that is what she was thinking the first time she saw her, stretching her eyes and waving her hands over a crystal ball surely stolen from someone’s kit - this kid is bad news. A prop, Esmé had called it, with the happy smile of an idiot. 

“You’re in the worst mood, aren’t you? I’ve been thinking that ever since you came in.” 

“Liar.” 

“Only the second part.” She is relenting. Esmé has sat back again and seems to be stretching her neck, her upper body very slightly rocking as her fingers trace the angled line of her throat. Georgina thinks she can see her trying to keep from yawning. “You told me,” she begins, slowly finding a path back to Georgina’s side, leaving a narrow gap between them from across which she strokes Georgina’s arm. “You told me, Georgina-”

“Stop this now,” she says softly. Esmé is watching her. And Georgina, with a half dismissive sleight of hand, gestures for her to turn, which she does, despite some reluctance. Georgina wraps her arm around her without a second thought. “You’re tired. Aren’t you?” 

“I know what you’re doing,” Esmé says, with her eyes closed, squeezing them stubbornly to resist how smoothly Georgina’s voice moves through her head. 

Georgina hums, moving her thumb in a slow, cosy rhythm. “It would be nice, wouldn’t it?” she murmurs, something in her heart like a loose tooth being wriggled. “You’re probably right, about the money. But things aren’t always about the money - even I know that.” She feels Esmé loosening, noticing how her head is beginning to drop. “A good marriage is a safe place - or so I’m told. If they make good marriages anymore.”

The last wedding Georgina recalls, although she did not go and had not been invited, was the Baudelaires’. She remembers it mostly due to Esmé’s absences and scattiness, she had called it, talking a mile a minute in a contrived fluster whenever they saw each other. They had barely known each other at the time - it’s years ago now, Georgina realises, since the Baudelaires’ were married - but Georgina had noticed all the same: bad news, she had quickly sussed, as if she hadn’t already known that from the few stories she had heard. It had interested her all the same. Only now does it hurt, although she can’t blame her, to think about it. In hindsight, it is one of the many things they have simply never discussed, and Georgina cannot help but wonder what it was that Esmé was doing over those few months - the wedding, apparently, had gone off without a hitch. 

“George,” Esmé says, patting her hand against her blindly, seemingly reaching for something. “Georgie.” Why is there a little touch of fear in her voice? Or is that just that she is tired, or she is groggy, or that she had been snoozing? She is somewhere half dreaming, Georgina realises, seeing the pearly, bleary look of her eyes as Esmé looks over; she is more interested, it seems, in being able to lie on her back again. 

It is here, somewhere, in the quiet and soft colour of the very early morning, that Georgina realises that she would marry her in an instant. She watches Esmé sigh heavily, sinking into the mattress, and she wonders why Esmé never asked her to repeat the sentiment of love disclosed this evening. Perhaps she knows? Georgina considers. Perhaps she doesn’t need to know.  
  
Bad news, Georgina thinks, turning off the lamp and settling uneasily into her side of the bed. A safe place, she thinks. It wouldn’t be a bad way to go, with Esmé nearby, in a house (a real house, not these glorified shoeboxes), somewhere quiet where you could see for miles around.

* * *

Esmé does not seem hungover in the morning. Perhaps it’s the champagne in the orange juice, although she is wearing sunglasses over breakfast. Georgina had woken up to her on the phone, making an urgent order for food. That she looked clean and was dressed and adjusting her lipstick as she made the call vexed Georgina only briefly - she was feeling starved. 

“You were very talkative last night, Georgina.” 

“Was I?” Georgina takes a short sip of coffee. She cannot stomach partaking in anything sweet. 

“Sometimes, George,” Esmé says, resting the point of her chin on her knuckles. “I don’t think I know anything at all that goes on in your head.” 

“Really.” Georgina continues with a feigned disinterest. The conversation is inscrutable to her, particularly with those ridiculous sunglasses, and she has spent too long last night wondering how a conversation about Esmé could have clawed its way into something so intimately about her. 

“I don’t think I could read your work if someone paid me, darling.” 

“My work?” 

“You were talking about that for at least an hour.” 

“Is that so.” 

There is a suspicious pause, Esmé’s fingernails scraping an inconsistent and slow pattern at the table. It is with a flourish that she raises her sunglasses to her hair (bloodshot eyes! Georgina is glad to see bloodshot eyes). 

“What on Earth are you blushing for, Georgina?” And of course, she is smiling, her tongue curling for a moment against a tooth. “It looks good on you, too.” (Her ambitions never falter.)

“Somebody,” Georgina says, knowing she cannot be furtive about this, straining an emphasis on the word, “was a little romantic last night. That’s all.” 

What surprises her is that it works - and that Esmé becomes slightly disquieted, her mouth open and, quite amazingly, no words coming out of it. Her eyes are painfully blue against the pinkish borders. “Well,” she says, with a little wiggle of her shoulders and a sudden interest, Georgina watches, in the other side of the room. “I can’t say I’m sorry, Georgie, you know what I’m - like. And you know how private functions -” 

“Oh, that’s alright,” Georgina says, with all her homely vowels and her trained bedside manner. “There’s no reason to rake it all up.”


End file.
